Privacy policy

Applies to the Lonely Explorer app for Android and iOS and to lonelyexplorer.site. Last updated 6 September 2026.

In short. Lonely Explorer records where you walk so it can reveal the map for you. That data is stored on your phone and backed up to our own server so you can restore it. There are no ads, no analytics, no third-party accounts and nothing is sold; the only third-party SDK is Firebase Crashlytics, which receives anonymous crash reports. You can delete everything yourself from inside the app.

1. What we collect

Data	Why	Where it lives
Location — GPS points while you record a walk; while “Keep exploring in the background” is on (Android, off by default), the phone’s last known position every ~15 minutes	To draw your routes and clear the fog on your map, compute distance, pace and statistics	Your phone; backed up to our server
Map cells — the ~12 m squares your walks have revealed	The fog of war itself, territories, medals, the leaderboard and friend duels	Your phone; backed up to our server
Places — spots you pin, with the name, emoji and optional photo you add	Your personal map of favourite places	Your phone; backed up to our server
Nickname and optional avatar photo	How other explorers see you on the leaderboard and in friend lists	Our server
Device secret — a random key generated on first launch	Identifies your account without an e-mail or password. Only a hash of it is stored on the server	Your phone; hash on our server
Friend code and friendships you create	Linking with friends and the weekly fog duel	Our server
Settings — fog reveal radius, route colours	So personalisation follows you to a new phone	Your phone; backed up to our server
Crash reports — stack trace, app version, device model and OS version, free memory and disk at the moment of a crash, plus a random per-install Crashlytics identifier	To find and fix crashes. Not linked to your nickname or account and never used for advertising	Google Firebase Crashlytics, kept for 90 days

We do not collect your name, e-mail address, phone number, contacts, advertising identifiers or anything from other apps. The app has no analytics SDK; the only third-party SDK is the crash reporter described above.

2. How it is used

Everything above exists to run the app: your map, your statistics, backup and restore, the leaderboard and friends.
Friends you link with can see which map cells you have revealed and your weekly totals — never your routes, GPS points or photos.
The public leaderboard shows only your nickname and totals (revealed area, number of walks, distance).
We never sell data, use it for advertising, or share it with anyone except as described in section 4.

3. Background location

Recording a walk keeps using location while the app is in the background so your route is complete when the screen is off. On Android you can additionally turn on “Keep exploring in the background” in Explorer settings. It reads the phone’s cached last known position roughly every 15 minutes (no active GPS) and marks that spot as explored. It is off by default, asks for your consent and the system “allow all the time” permission first, and can be switched off at any time.

4. Third parties

Map tiles are loaded from OpenFreeMap; like any web request this reveals your IP address and which map areas you view to that service.
Place names (“Chatuchak, Bangkok” under a walk) come from your phone’s built-in geocoder (Google on Android, Apple on iOS) and district areas from OpenStreetMap Nominatim; a coordinate or a district name is sent, nothing else.
Discoveries (parks, waters, bridges your fog uncovered) are matched on our server against OpenStreetMap data; your cells never leave our server for that.
When you use Share, the picture or GPX file goes only to the app you pick in the system share sheet.
Crash reports go to Firebase Crashlytics (Google). They contain no location, nickname or account data, are not used for tracking or advertising, and are deleted by Google after 90 days.

5. Where and how long

The server (lonelyexplorer.site) is operated by us on a virtual machine hosted by DigitalOcean. Data is sent over HTTPS only. Each backup replaces the previous one; the last ten backups per account are kept so a bad sync can be rolled back. Your data is kept until you delete it.

6. Deleting your data

In the app open Explorer → Privacy → Delete my data. This erases your account and everything attached to it on the server (walks, map cells, places and photos, backups, friendships, nickname, avatar) and wipes the app on your phone. It is immediate and cannot be undone.

If you no longer have the app, e-mail support@lonelyexplorer.site with your nickname and we will delete the account within 30 days. Uninstalling the app alone does not delete the server copy.

7. Children

Lonely Explorer is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

8. Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be published here with a new date. Material changes will be mentioned in the app.

9. Contact

support@lonelyexplorer.site